Manage your subscription

Educational DVDs 'slow infant learning'

Educational DVDs may hinder rather than help a young child’s learning. Infants who watch DVDs such as Brainy Baby and Baby Einstein know fewer words than those who do not watch such programmes, a new study suggests.

In recent years the popularity of such infant programmes has soared, particularly in the US. Parents hope the programmes, which typically consist of brief dialogue and picture sequences, will boost the learning ability of children as young as eight months old, even though the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended that youngsters not watch television until two years of age.

To find out what effect these programmes have, Dimitri Christakis at the University of Washington in Seattle, US, and his colleagues contacted about 500 families with a child born in the previous 16 months.

During telephone interviews – which each lasted around 45 minutes – parents heard a list of about 90 words, such as “truck” and “cookie”, and indicated which their 8- to 16-month-old children understood. They also gave other details, including how much they read to their children, and the amount and type of television their youngsters watched.

Advertisement

Lost for words

The results contradict claims that baby DVDs help toddlers to communicate with their parents. After controlling for other factors, such as parents’ educational status and the number of children per household, the analysis revealed that for every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs, toddlers understood an average of six to eight words fewer than those who did not view them. On average the children recognised about 25 words, although the number varied according to age.

“There are only a fixed number of hours that young babies are awake and alert,” says Andrew Meltzoff, a co-author of the new study. He says “babies are not getting the same linguistic experience” that they would from interacting with adults if that alert time is spent watching DVDs.

The company Baby Einstein says that its educational DVDs are designed to free parents, allowing them to interact with their children more by clapping and pointing to objects. It adds that young children are highly likely to be exposed to television in modern households, and that specially designed developmental programmes are better than many of the alternatives.

However, Christakis takes a different view. “I’m not anti-TV,” he says (see Childhood TV and gaming is ‘major public health issue’). But he is unconvinced that television is appropriate for children under two years of age. He says the onus is on manufacturers to show that their baby DVDs improve children’s cognitive development.

The new study demonstrates that watching special television programmes does not necessarily “jumpstart a child’s communication systems”, says language disorder researcher Mabel Rice at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, US.

But she cautions that the researchers did not eliminate the possibility that parents who show their child baby DVDs interact less with them, and she says it is that lack of interaction that sets back their child’s learning.